.jpeg)
Good Neighbor Podcast: Fort Collins
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of Fort Collins. Good Neighbor Podcast hosted by Nick George helps residents discover and connect with your local business owners in and around Fort Collins, Colorado.
Is your business serving the residents of Fort Collins? Then, we need to talk! Visit gnpFortCollins.com to schedule your free interview.
Good Neighbor Podcast: Fort Collins
E9: Building Community in an Age of Isolation
The loneliness epidemic has reached staggering proportions in America, with 60% of people reporting significant periods of isolation — a health impact comparable to smoking a pack of cigarettes daily. But what if our neighborhoods themselves could be redesigned to heal this modern crisis?
Michael Gornik, co-founder of Polestar Gardens, shares a compelling vision for community-centered living that challenges how we think about home, neighborhood, and belonging. Founded 25 years ago as an educational nonprofit focused on holistic development, Polestar Gardens has evolved through remarkable challenges—including a son's cancer battle and the complete loss of their Hawaii campus to volcanic eruption in 2018. Rather than surrender their mission, these hardships became catalysts for transformation.
Now, Polestar Gardens is creating an innovative "intentional neighborhood" on the former Happy Heart Farm in Fort Collins—Colorado's first CSA. This 144-unit development integrates co-housing principles with new urbanism to create a walkable, car-optional community where meaningful relationships can flourish naturally. From micro-units to single-family homes, the development is designed to foster diverse, multi-generational connections that Michael believes humans are fundamentally wired to need.
Reflecting on Polestar's origins in youth programming, Michael reveals how watching children thrive in community settings—surrounded by mentors, peers, and opportunities to care for others—demonstrated the profound impact our social environment has on human potential. This inspired a lifelong mission to create accessible spaces where the "web of relationship" that nurtures our best selves can be woven into everyday life.
As Americans increasingly recognize the costs of isolation, Polestar Village offers a thoughtful alternative. Could reimagining how we design our living spaces be key to addressing our loneliness crisis? Visit https://www.polestarvillage.com/ to explore this vision for community-centered living and discover what happens when we design neighborhoods with human connection as the foundation.
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Nick George.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. Are you considering donating to a meaningful charitable organization? One might be closer than you think. Today I have the pleasure of introducing your good neighbor, Michael Gornick, with Polestar Gardens. Michael, how's it going?
Speaker 3:Going well. Thanks for having me today, Nick.
Speaker 2:We're excited to learn all about your business. Tell us about your organization.
Speaker 3:My wife and I started Polestar Gardens, which is an educational nonprofit. It's a 501c3. 25 years ago this year, so we're celebrating 25 years, which is kind of amazing, and our basic thesis is the power of community, and especially in education, and we define education as physical, mental and spiritual development. So what Polestar is set out to do is to harness the power of community, which is to say our relationships with everyone we live and work with, for each individual's growth and potential.
Speaker 2:How did you get into this type of volunteer work?
Speaker 3:Good question. I raised two kids in an intentional community and what I learned from that was inspiring and really jaw-dropping when I saw how important the macro environment around our kids are to their development and to them reaching their potential. So that was watching my kids grow in an environment where they had many friends of all ages. They knew adults as friends. They had many mentors, they had aunties and uncles who looked out for them. They had younger friends who they looked out for and sort of that web of relationship is really at the heart of what inspired us to start Pulsar Gardens.
Speaker 2:What are?
Speaker 3:some myths and misconceptions in your line of work. Oh, good question. Well, one of the things we're endeavoring to do right now is create an ideal environment, what we're calling an intentional neighborhood. So you're probably familiar with co-housing I hope you are a little bit. Yes, you may know that this is co-housing week, this is National Co-Housing Week and there's a whole bunch of events. You can Google them and participate, including open houses and a lot of streamed events. But basically, you may also know that 60% of Americans profess that they are lonely for significant periods of time 60% and so the Surgeon general calls it an epidemic. It's like smoking a pack a day for your health loneliness.
Speaker 3:So our American culture has evolved. We don't want to get too into that rabbit hole, but in a way that is conducive to isolation. You know where we have very car-oriented society. We drive a lot, we don't have our feet on the ground with our neighbors, where we're, you know, rubbing elbows with the people who live near us and create those relationships. So I would say, to get back to your question, one of the misconceptions about co-housing in particular is that it takes a very certain kind of individual, which, in a way, it's true because our society is so wired for the individual expression we have to work a little upstream to get back to that more community feel. That is much more common in other cultures actually, and I could argue that we're wired to be in a tribe. We're wired to have that complex set of relationships that they contribute a lot to our sense of well-being.
Speaker 2:I absolutely agree.
Speaker 3:Can you hear me? Okay, I can hear you, fine, thanks.
Speaker 2:Who are your target supporters and donors? How do you attract them?
Speaker 3:Good question when Polestar started.
Speaker 3:25 years ago we did a lot of youth programs. We had kids and we really wanted to get kids involved in their community, teach them life skills. So we basically did lots of things with young adults Well, all ages, but especially young adults. So we did a lot of adventure. We did a lot of life skills. I'm a builder by trade for most of my life, so we did a lot of building projects. We do just about all the sports you know. So we and we enjoy having a lot of fun with our kids. I think that's a real important thing Having fun with your kids. Designing events that all ages can have fun and play together is a real bonding important thing. And now I've forgotten your question.
Speaker 2:Well, you might've just answered my next question because that didn't sound like most people's work. But outside of that work, what do you do for fun?
Speaker 3:Oh okay. Well, I've been a fairly serious volleyball player my whole life but have finally put down the volleyball and we play more pickleball now, which is actually a pretty great sport. It's when you can play with your grandkids and I think there's a lot to recommend. Pickleball is a lifelong sport. You know it's a little harder recommend pickleball as a lifelong sport. You know it's a little harder to play competitive volleyball at my age.
Speaker 2:So I have to acknowledge that let's switch gears. Can you describe a hardship or a life challenge that you overcame and how it made you stronger?
Speaker 3:What comes to mind. Okay, well, that's an obvious one. We started Polestar. Well, I'll first tell one story, which was my son got cancer when he was seven years old or, no, I'm sorry, nine years old. He got cancer and prospects didn't look good, and that was just a whole lot to face and taught us a lot. You know it. Really, we learned a whole lot through his cancer journey and he beat the odds. He did lose his right foot to cancer and he's amazingly, he's on the Parabeach Olympic volleyball team or national team, I should say and he's a very serious athlete, and so that was something that we all struggled through and learned a lot about life and about each other and about what we value, and so that was very educational and then really, in the end, inspiring.
Speaker 3:The other thing I have to mention because it's so it's much more about our organization is that we went to the Big Island and spent 15 years there and built a whole campus and community there Big organic garden, you know, had big guest programs there, did many retreats, many programs. We had a woofer program. People would come from all over the world to work in the garden. But in 2018, there was that Kilauea eruption, which was a historically very large eruption and it surrounded our whole property. Well, we had to evacuate, us and all our neighbors, and in the end the lava actually didn't cover our land, which was just 20 acres of pristine beauty in the tropics. We had 25 avocado trees and all the fruits and nut trees growing and beautiful, beautiful setting with a community center and a community house and cabins for guests. And it was.
Speaker 3:It was a big loss but and for a long time it didn't nothing happened because the lava was just flowing by it, but over time it ended up burning down the main structures there and so we basically lost our Hawaii campus, and it was a real turning point for us. We thought about it for about 15 minutes and realized we would try a new, we would try to create a new campus. But what we learned and this is the how it made of stronger part of it is what we really learned was that we wanted to and this was the original goal when we started Polestar we wanted to create an environment that was more accessible, more integrated with, you know, normal modern living. You know, our Hawaii campus was kind of a retreat, very remote, very beautiful, wonderful time we had there. But in terms of what we really set out to do, what we're doing here in Fort Collins is much more on point.
Speaker 3:Please tell our Michael, please tell our listeners one thing they can remember, or they should remember, about Polestar Gardens Okay, well, I think the main thing we'd like you to remember is that we are just, you know, we bought the many people in Fort Collins may remember Happy Heart Farm, which is on Elizabeth Street and it was the first CSA in the state of Colorado and it was farmed by our dear friends Dennis and Bailey Stinson organically for many decades.
Speaker 3:They were over three decades farming that place and many people have had a farm to fork meal there and fondly remember Happy Heart Farm. Well, we've known Denison Bailey for many decades and we bought that farm and some adjoining parcels and are now almost through the city process of approvals for what we call an intentional neighborhood which would be the new Polestar campus. So it's kind of a co-housing meets new urbanism meets spiritual community kind of development. You know it's a large development and it has all the things that we want to envision in a conscious community. And so anyway, just to you know, to make a plug for it, we have there's 144 units being approved in the next weeks. Actually we're that close to being approved. It includes 18 single-family homes, everything from micro units 450 square feet, townhomes, condos it's a whole range of living units that are designed to have a very diverse, very intentional community that cares about the values that we express in Polestar Gardens.
Speaker 2:Impressive. How can our listeners learn more about Polestar Gardens?
Speaker 3:PolestarVillagecom and, yeah, you can read all about it. We've got, we got, you know, architectural drawings in there. The whole site plan, this whole thing is made to be walkable. So you could, you could, really in Polestar Village, you could really live without a car if you wanted to. We've got the bus line on Elizabeth Street, which is going to be upgraded soon. We've got a bike share and a car share program and we have, you know, places there to grow food, places there to do yoga and meditate, places there to gather with your friends, places to work. There's just a lot of intention being put into the macro environment, Rather than which Americans are good at this. We think about our home, you know, which is great, but we don't think about designing, in my opinion as well, our neighborhood, you know. So if we really think about wanting to know our neighbors and be in relationship with our neighbors, we'll think about that environment much more clearly and differently.
Speaker 2:Well, michael, I really appreciate you being on the show. We wish you and Polestar Gardens, polestar Village, the best moving forward.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to GNPFortCollinscom. That's GNPFortCollinscom, or call 970-438-0825.